THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

With every Republican member who requested being allowed to introduce their very own Repeal Obamacare bill, when it came time to shit or get off the pot, the Republicans in Congress failed to drop their favorite dookie.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, facing a revolt among conservative and moderate Republicans, rushed to the White House Friday afternoon to inform President Trump he did not have the votes to pass legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act and to decide whether to pull the bill from consideration.

The president and the speaker faced the humiliating prospect of a major defeat on legislation promised for seven years, since the landmark health legislation was signed into law. President Trump had demanded a vote regardless, which has been scheduled for Friday afternoon. But House leaders were leaning against such a public loss.

The Republican legislation, called the American Health Care Act, would end the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that almost everyone have health care, replacing it with a system of age-based tax credits to purchase health insurance — a shift that would save the government hundreds of billions of dollars and would cut taxes, but could leave 24 million more Americans without coverage in a decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said.

Republicans said President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement, the 2010 health care law, had been a failure, disrupting coverage for millions of people and fueling big increases in health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket medical costs. Insurers in many states, they said, were losing hundreds of millions of dollars under the health law and have dropped out of the public marketplaces.

“For seven years, Americans have been hurt by Obamacare,” said Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. “They have pleaded with Congress to get the government out of the examining room and give them health care they can afford. This failed Obamacare experiment is over. It’s time to act.”

But Republican divisions were still on public display. Representative Rodney Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, announced Friday that he would oppose the Republican bill, joining other moderates from Northeastern states.

“Seven years after enactment of Obamacare, I wanted to support legislation that made positive changes to rescue health care in America,” he wrote in a statement. “Unfortunately, the legislation before the House today is currently unacceptable as it would place significant new costs and barriers to care on my constituents in New Jersey.”

And the irony of its defeat is that it failed to be painful enough to poors and others to satisfy the most cruel and reactionary elements of the GOP. But if it had pleased that group it would have offended that small remaining group that still have a breath of humanity in them. So in the end it is like our Potemkin President, it looks good on the face of it but has nothing to back it up.